1. Field of the Invention
This invention pertains generally to an apparatus for handling materials, and more specifically to a hand truck adapted to forming and handling flakes from a larger bale of material. The invention is most particularly adapted to separating and transporting flakes from large bales of hay, straw and the like.
2. Description of the Related Art
In the agricultural industry, many different crops and other materials are baled. Bales are useful not only for handling, but also for storage and transport. The formation of a bale alleviates the need for handling each individual component of the bale. Furthermore, bales are typically retained with cord, wire, string, twine or the like, which enables the source material to be compressed by large forces, thereby saving space. Furthermore, in cases where the bales are appropriately shaped, individual bales may be stacked and arranged into larger arrangements, thereby allowing very efficient storage of a large amount of material in a small space.
In the particular case of hay, prior to the introduction of balers, haystacks were a common sight across the countryside. Disadvantageously, loosely stacked hay requires very large volumes of space for storage, and the hay can present a number of hazards and difficulties. For example, hay that is not restrained may easily be swept away during strong wind gusts. Yet a barn or other storage area large enough to hold loosely packed hay is obviously not particularly economical. Furthermore, the loosely packed hay provides an ideal environment for varmints and other pests, and may provide an opportunity for rapid ignition and combustion of a material that is already too flammable. Efficiently handling loose hay or straw presents an enormous challenge, due to the relatively light weight and large volume of each particular stem or stalk. For these and a variety of other reasons, conversion to bales has proven to be much more economical for many agricultural products.
Early baling machines for hay and straw formed rectangular bales of moderate size and weight that could be handled by a person. These bales, due to their rectangular shape, were much more compact and made the processes of storage and distribution of the baled materials much simpler. For example, bales containing many times the amount of hay found in loose stacks could be arranged on a wagon during harvesting, neatly stacked into layered rows. A typical bale might be approximately one and one-half feet by two feet by three feet in size, and might weigh in the vicinity of fifty or sixty pounds. Please note, however, that both the size and weight of hay bales may be varied considerably, depending greatly upon the moisture content of the hay and the settings for the automated baler.
These small rectangular hay bales enable farmers to easily handle and feed or bed greater quantities of hay with much less effort and time, and in smaller spaces. Each bale forms a single unit structure out of thousands of stems, stalks, leaves, blades, etc. Nevertheless, each bale of this size requires manual intervention during stacking for transport, storage and distribution.
While these small rectangular bales are a vast improvement over loose hay or straw, each bale still tends to require a significant amount of manual intervention, and manual intervention translates into added labor costs. For example, loading bales onto a hay wagon has typically been a multiple person job. One person operates a tractor, while one or more additional people stack individual bales onto the wagon. Some baling machines were designed to throw the bales directly onto the wagon. Unfortunately, these machines are more complicated and prone to failure, and occasionally individual bales break during the obviously rough handling, resulting in increased losses of material.
To simplify the baling and transport process, large round balers were introduced that are able to form a single large bale five or six feet in diameter. These bales, due to their size, are typically loaded and transported with a fork lift, allowing a single person to much more quickly handle an equivalent of many single smaller bales of hay. Round bales, however, fail to provide the full stacking and storage density attained with smaller rectangular bales. Nevertheless, large round bales provided economies of scale that have proven to be very attractive to many farmers.
Even more recently, techniques have been developed for forming larger "square" bales of hay equivalent to multiples of the older rectangular bales. For the purposes of this disclosure, it will be understood that these large bales may not actually be square in construction, and could certainly be rectangular depending upon the particular design of any given machine, but nevertheless will be referred to herein as square for the sake of differentiation from the older and smaller rectangular bales. These square bales offer many advantages similar to the large round bales, such as reduced manual handling and associated labor. In addition, these bales may be tightly stacked to leave no openings therebetween, advantageously allowing the hay to be stored compactly and efficiently.
Nevertheless, during feeding and bedding, these new bales should desirably be broken down into sizes suitable for handling manually. Otherwise, the large bales are only suitable for applications where the bale may be delivered intact, such as for large central feeding stations, or where automated equipments exists to shred or otherwise handle the bales. While apparatus have been developed to assist with manual handling of a variety of materials and containers, none has been devised that would specifically assist a person with the handling of these large square bales.
U.S. Pat. No. 31,741 by Rentgen illustrates a hand truck having two short frame pieces with a curved hook which grabs the material being transported. While he discloses agricultural uses such as "sugar-hogsheads, bales of cotton, etc.," the bales for which the hand truck is designed are small round bales, and his hand truck would have no utility with large squares of material.
Wetzel in U.S. Pat. No. 4,174,849 and Talbot in U.S. Pat. No. 4,793,623 each disclose handlers using hooks to grasp and retain material, including agricultural products such as hay. The Wetzel patent is limited however, to bales of fairly specific dimension, since the carrier must be placed over the bale first and then hooked into the bale. While Talbot allows for many more diverse sizes of bales, it would be entirely impractical to attempt to handle the large square bales manually, and neither Talbot nor Wetzel make provision for both separating and transporting flakes from a bale.
U.S. Pat. Nos. 605,058 to Horton; 1,800,679 to Day; 363,693 and 512,915 to Spaulding; 461,522 to Mead; 455,653 to Butcher; and 1,525,444 to Gignac all illustrates a combination of a toe and a grasping hook in a hand truck. Nevertheless, none of these are adapted for specific and advantageous use with large squares of hay. As a result, the hooks typically extend perpendicular to the frame well beyond the toe, which allows handling of rigid loads such as boxes that may potentially be many times larger than the toe itself, but which is of disadvantage when working with large squares of hay and straw. Other references include U.S. Pat. No. 1,636,574 to Perry which shows another agricultural handler designed for loosely stacked bales; U.S. Pat. No. 5,476,356 to Weiss which shows a large mechanical bale handler; U.S. Pat. No. 5,716,183 to Gibson et al which illustrates a handler with specific features for a specific load (in this case, toilets); and the abstract of U.S. Pat. No. 5,094,581 to Lamb disclosing another large equipment handler for hay bales.
Though incorporated herein by reference for their teachings with regard to handling various materials and construction of handlers in general, none of these prior documents describes and illustrates a handler suited for handling hay or straw in the form of large square bales. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 31,741 is designed for small round bales of material which may be grasped about a perimeter thereof. This design would be of no value in the effort of extracting or handling a flake of hay from a larger bale. Therefore, a substantial need exists for apparatus which enables better manual handling of portions of larger square bales. The apparatus should desirably not offset the many advantages obtained by the economy of scale gained through the larger bale size.